By Ademola Alawiye

Friday, 3 Dec 2010

The Nigerian Investment Banking League, in collaboration with Alexander Forbes, has announced plans to give awards to Nigeria‘s most effective issuing, debt and equity houses.

The Managing Director, SBA Research Limited, Mr. Segun Akande, said in a statement that the NIBL awards was designed to celebrate the achievements of people and institutions in the financial sector.

He said, ”The last two years have been an extremely difficult period for the financial markets. The global recession has had a fairly devastating effect on the Nigerian capital markets. However, despite the strenuous financial terrain, some companies still managed to excel.”

Akande added, ”This year, as the world economy experiences slow recovery, NIBL aims to bring together Nigeria‘s most celebrated financial institutions, rewarding those that have made an outstanding contribution to transactions in the last 12 months.”

The NIBL was established by SBA Research to enhance transparency, efficiency, healthy competition in the capital markets and to celebrate best performing issuing houses.

Akande said this year‘s awards was categorised into four groups.

According to him, this year‘s award categories include best equity house, best debt house, mergers and acquisition and best investment bank of the year.

He said, ”In the past, winners have been ranked and chosen by a distinguished panel of judges. This year, however, we are particularly pleased with our association with Alexander Forbes. We have set up a scoring committee, the aim was to clearly define the scoring criteria and make it public.

”We developed a page on our website to enable companies to upload their transactions. The system automatically calculates their scores, using the approved and publicised scoring system. We have made the website even more transparent by enabling all users to view the transactions, results and scores of their competitors.”

He pointed out that NIBL had an independent auditor to audit all the results.

He said, ”As part of the process of complete transparency, once SBA finishes tallying up the scores, the results will be sent to the independent auditor for verification and confirmation. This process removes all elements of doubt and gives our awards total credibility.”

 

Source: Punch